Christopher Columbus and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery Part 13

[Sidenote: Saturnian continent.]

There are, however, three legends which have come down to us from the cla.s.sic times, which the discovery of America revived with new interest in the speculative excursions of the curiously learned, and it is one of the proofs of the narrow range of Columbus's acquaintance with original cla.s.sic writers that these legends were not pressed by him in support of his views. The most persistent of these in presenting a question for the physical geographer is the story of Atlantis, traced to a tale told by Plato of a tradition of an island in the Atlantic which eight thousand years ago had existed in the west, opposite the Pillars of Hercules; and which, in a great inundation, had sunken beneath the sea, leaving in mid ocean large mud shoals to impede navigation and add to the terrors of a vast unknown deep. There have been those since the time of Gomara who have believed that the land which Columbus found dry and inhabited was a resurrected Atlantis, and geographers even of the seventeenth century have mapped out its provinces within the usual outline of the American continents. Others have held, and some still hold, that the Atlantic islands are but peaks of this submerged continent. There is no evidence to show that these fancies of the philosopher ever disturbed even the most erratic moments of Columbus, nor could he have pored over the printed Latin of Plato, if it came in his way, till its first edition appeared in 1483, during his stay in Portugal. Neither do we find that he makes any references to that other creation, the land of the Meropes, as figured in the pa.s.sages cited by aelian some seven hundred years after Theopompus had conjured up the vision in the fourth century before Christ. Equally ignorant was Columbus, it would appear, of the great Saturnian continent, lying five days west from Britain, which makes a story in Plutarch's _Morals_.

[Sidenote: Earlier voyages on the Atlantic.]

[Sidenote: Phoenicians.]

[Sidenote: Carthaginians.]

[Sidenote: Romans.]

We deal with a different problem when we pa.s.s from these theories and imaginings of western lands to such records as exist of what seem like attempts in the earliest days to attain by actual exploration the secret of this interjacent void. The Phoenicians had pa.s.sed the Straits of Gibraltar and found Gades (Cadiz), and very likely attempted to course the Atlantic, about 1100 years before the birth of Christ. Perhaps they went to Cornwall for tin. It may have been by no means impossible for them to have pa.s.sed among the Azores and even to have reached the American islands and main, as a statement in Diodorus Siculus has been interpreted to signify. Then five hundred years later or more we observe the Carthaginians pursuing their adventurous way outside the Pillars of Hercules, going down the African coast under Hanno to try the equatorial horrors, or running westerly under Hamilko to wonder at the Sarga.s.so sea. Later, the Phoenicians seem to have made some lodgment in the islands off the coasts of northwestern Africa. The Romans in the fourth century before Christ pushed their way out into the Atlantic under Pytheas and Euthymenes, the one daring to go as far as Thule--whatever that was--in the north, and the other to Senegal in the south. It was in the same century that Rome had the strange sight of some unknown barbarians, of a race not recognizable, who were taken upon the sh.o.r.es of the German Ocean, where they had been cast away. Later writers have imagined--for no stronger word can be used--that these weird beings were North American Indians, or rather more probably Eskimos. About the same time, Sertorius, a Roman commander in Spain, learned, as already mentioned, of some salubrious islands lying westward from Africa, and gave Horace an opportunity, in the evil days of the civil war, to picture them as a refuge.

When the Romans ruled the world, commerce lost much of the hazard and enterprise which had earlier instigated international rivalry. The interest in the western ocean subsided into merely speculative concern; and wild fancy was brought into play in depicting its horrors, its demons and shoals, with the intermingling of sky and water.

[Sidenote: Knowledge of such early attempts.]

[Sidenote: Maps XVth cent.]

[Sidenote: Genoese voyages, 1291.]

It is by no means certain that Columbus knew anything of this ancient lore of the early Mediterranean people. There is little or nothing in the early maps of the fifteenth century to indicate that such knowledge was current among those who made or contributed to the making of such of these maps as have come down to us. The work of some of the more famous chart makers Columbus could hardly have failed to see, or heard discussed in the maritime circles of Portugal; and indeed it was to his own countrymen, Marino Sanuto, Pizignani, Bianco, and Fra Mauro, that Portuguese navigators were most indebted for the broad cartographical treatment of their own discoveries. At the same time there was no dearth of legends of the venturesome Genoese, with fortunes not always rea.s.suring. There was a story, for instance, of some of these latter people, who in 1291 had sailed west from the Pillars of Hercules and had never returned. Such was a legend that might not have escaped Columbus's attention even in his own country, a.s.sociating with it the names of the luckless Tedisio Doria and Ugolino Vivaldi in their efforts to find a western way to India. Harrisse, however, who has gone over all the evidence of such a purpose, fails to be satisfied.

These stories of ocean hazards hung naturally about the seaports of Portugal.

[Sidenote: Antillia.]

Galvano tells us of such a tale concerning a Portuguese s.h.i.+p, driven west, in 1447, to an island with seven cities, where its sailors found the people speaking Portuguese, who said they had deserted their country on the death of King Roderigo. This is the legend of Antillia, already referred to.

[Sidenote: Islands seen.]

Columbus recalled, when afterwards at the Canaries on his first voyage, how it was during his sojourn in Portugal that some one from Madeira presented to the Portuguese king a pet.i.tion for a vessel to go in quest of land, occasionally seen to the westward from that island. Similar stories were not unknown to him of like apparitions being familiar in the Azores. A story which he had also heard of one Antonio Leme having seen three islands one hundred leagues west of the Azores had been set down to a credulous eye, which had been deceived by floating fields of vegetation.

[Sidenote: The Basques.]

There was no obstacle in the pa.s.sing of similar reports around the Bay of Biscay from the coasts of the Basques, and the story might be heard of Jean de Echaide, who had found stores of stockfish off a land far oceanward,--an exploit supposed to be commemorated in the island of Stokafixia, which stands far away to the westward in the Bianco map of 1436. All these tales of the early visits of the Basques to what imaginative minds have supposed parts of the American coasts derive much of their perennial charm from a.s.sociations with a remarkable people.

There is indeed nothing improbable in a hardy daring which could have borne the Basques to the Newfoundland sh.o.r.es at almost any date earlier than the time of Columbus.

[Sidenote: Newfoundland banks possibly visited.]

Fructuoso, writing as late as 1590, claimed that a Portuguese navigator, Joo Vaz Cortereal, had sailed to the codfish coast of Newfoundland as early as 1464, but Barrow seems to be the only writer of recent times who has believed the tale, and Biddle and Harrisse find no evidence to sustain it.

[Sidenote: Tartary supposed to be seen.]

There is a statement recorded by Columbus, if we may trust the account of the _Historie_, that a sailor at Santa Maria had told him how, being driven westerly in a voyage to Ireland, he had seen land, which he then thought to be Tartary. Some similar experiences were also told to Columbus by Pieter de Velasco, of Galicia; and this land, according to the account, would seem to have been the same sought at a later day by the Cortereals (1500).

[Sidenote: Dubious pre-Columbian voyages.]

It is not easy to deal historically with long-held traditions. The furbishers of transmitted lore easily make it reflect what they bring to it. To find ill.u.s.trations in any inquiry is not so difficult if you select what you wish, and discard all else, and the result of this discriminating accretion often looks very plausible. Historical truth is reached by balancing everything, and not by a.s.similating that which easily suits. Almost all these discussions of pre-Columbian voyagings to America afford ill.u.s.trations of this perverted method. Events in which there is no inherent untruth are not left with the natural defense of probability, but are proved by deductions and inferences which could just as well be applied to prove many things else, and are indeed applied in a new way by every new upstart in such inquiries. The story of each discoverer before Columbus has been upheld by the stock intimation of white-bearded men, whose advent is somehow mysteriously discovered to have left traces among the aborigines of every section of the coast.

[Ill.u.s.tration: OCEANIC CURRENTS.

[From Reclus's _Amerique Boreale_.]]

[Sidenote: Traces of a western land in drift.]

There was another cla.s.s of evidence which, as the _Historie_ informs us, served some purpose in bringing conviction to the mind of Columbus. Such were the phenomenal was.h.i.+ng ash.o.r.e on European coasts of unknown pines and other trees, sculptured logs, huge bamboos, whose joints could be made into vessels to hold nine bottles of wine, and dead bodies with strange, broad faces. Even canoes, with living men in them of wonderful aspects, had at times been reported as thrown upon the Atlantic islands.

Such events had not been unnoticed ever since the Canaries and the Azores had been inhabited by a continental race, and conjectures had been rife long before the time of Columbus that westerly winds had brought these estrays from a distant land,--a belief more comprehensible at that time than any dependence upon the unsuspected fact that it was the oceanic currents, rather, which impelled these migratory objects.

[Sidenote: Gulf Stream.]

It required the experiences of later Spanish navigators along the Bahama Channel, and those of the French and English farther north upon the Banks of Newfoundland, before it became clear that the currents of the Atlantic, grazing the Cape of Good Hope and whirling in the Gulf of Mexico, sprayed in a curling fringe in the North Atlantic. This in a measure became patent to Sir Humphrey Gilbert sixty or seventy years after the death of Columbus.

If science had then been equal to the microscopic tasks which at this day it imposes on itself, the question of western lands might have been studied with an interest beyond what attached to the trunks of trees, carved timbers, edible nuts, and seeds of alien plants, which the Gulf Stream is still bringing to the sh.o.r.es of Europe. It might have found in the dust settling upon the throngs of men in the Old World, the sh.e.l.ls of animalcules, differing from those known to the observing eye in Europe, which, indeed, had been carried in the upper currents of air from the banks of the Orinoco.

[Sidenote: Influence of Portuguese discoveries upon Columbus.]

[Sidenote: _Ephemerides_ of Regiomonta.n.u.s.]

Once in Portugal, Columbus was brought in close contact with that eager spirit of exploration which had survived the example of Prince Henry and his navigators. If Las Casas was well informed, these Portuguese discoveries were not without great influence upon the Genoese's receptive mind. He was now where he could hear the fresh stories of their extending acquaintance with the African coast. His wife's sister, by the accepted accounts, had married Pedro Correa, a navigator not without fame in those days, and a companion in maritime inquiry upon whom Columbus could naturally depend,--unless, as Harrisse decides, he was no navigator at all. Columbus was also at hand to observe the growing skill in the arts of navigation which gave the Portuguese their preeminence. He had not been long in Lisbon when Regiomonta.n.u.s gave a new power in astronomical calculations of positions at sea by publis.h.i.+ng his _Ephemerides_, for the interval from 1475 to 1506, upon which Columbus was yet to depend in his eventful voyage.

[Sidenote: Martin Behaim.]

The most famous of the pupils of this German mathematician was himself in Lisbon during the years of Columbus's sojourn. We have no distinct evidence that Martin Behaim, a Nuremberger, pa.s.sed any courtesies with the Genoese adventurer, but it is not improbable that he did. His position was one that would attract Columbus, who might never have been sought by Behaim. The Nuremberger's standing was, indeed, such as to gain the attention of the Court, and he was thought not unworthy to be joined with the two royal physicians, Roderigo and Josef, on a commission to improve the astrolabe. Their perfected results mark an epoch in the art of seamans.h.i.+p in that age.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SAMPLES OF THE TABLES OF REGIOMONTa.n.u.s, 1474-1506.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE AFRICAN COAST, 1478.

[From Nordenskiold's _Facsimile Atlas_.]]

[Sidenote: Guinea coast, 1482.]

[Sidenote: The Congo reached, 1484.]

It was a new sensation when news came that at last the Portuguese had crossed the equator, in pus.h.i.+ng along the African coast. In January, 1482, they had said their first ma.s.s on the Guinea coast, and the castle of San Jorge da Mina was soon built under the new impulse to enterprise which came with the accession of Joo II. In 1484 they reached the Congo, under the guidance of Diogo Cam, and Martin Behaim was of his company.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MARTIN BEHAIM.]

These voyages were not without strong allurements to the Genoese sailor.

He is thought to have been a partic.i.p.ant in some of the later cruises.

The _Historie_ claims that he began to reason, from his new experiences, that if land could be discovered to the south there was much the same chance of like discoveries in the west. But there were experiences of other kinds which, in the interim, if we believe the story, he underwent in the north.